Pickaxe
by the ramblin rose
Summary: Caryl, short. S1, Ep5 "Wildfire." He understood all of it, but he couldn't tell her that. Her secrets were out, but he still wanted to keep his.


**AN: This is in a series of "shorts" that I'm doing for entertainment value as I rewatch some episodes. Some of them are interpretations/rewrites of scenes that are in each episode. Some are scenes that never happened but could have in "imagination land". They aren't meant to be taken seriously and they aren't meant to be mind-blowing fic. They're just for entertainment value and allowing me to stretch my proverbial writing muscles. If you find any enjoyment in them at all, then I'm glad. If you don't, I apologize for wasting your time. They're "shorts" or "drabbles" or whatever you want to call them so I'm not worrying with how long they are. Some will be shorter, some will be longer.**

 **This one is partially from the show and partially of my own creation/embellishment.**

 **I own nothing from the Walking Dead.**

 **I hope that you enjoy! Let me know what you think!**

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"I'll do it. He was my husband."

Those were the most confident words that Daryl was certain he'd ever heard Carol say. Even if her voice quaked slightly with the declaration, the hand she held out to him to request the pickaxe backed up her intention. She was going to do it. The man on the ground was her husband.

Her husband that everyone in camp knew beat her.

Once upon a time there were secrets. Things like that, Daryl knew, happened behind closed doors. They were kept "private" matters and only got out if someone finally decided that they should. They only got out if someone finally said "enough was enough" and sought help or something bad enough happened that the authorities inserted themselves into "private" matters. Jim's attitude—"that's their marriage"—hadn't been an entirely uncommon belief.

Daryl knew it. Private matters, family matters, were simply something that others didn't muddle in. They weren't shared. But whether Carol wanted them shared or not, everyone in the camp knew what was going on with Ed. That's why Shane had beaten him within an inch of his life. That's why no one was particularly sorry that there was less left of his corpse than there was of any deer they'd picked clean since Daryl had brought it to camp. They were, in all honesty, sorrier to see the deer go.

Daryl passed Carol the muck-covered pickaxe and, for a moment, wondered if her fragile frame could support the weight of the tool. She lifted it up, though, and she brought it home. She drove it into the barely recognizable skull of the man with whom she'd shared her life. Tears streamed down her face and Daryl couldn't help but wonder if the tears were for the man that she was putting down or if they were tears for something else.

Maybe she loved him. She must have. If she hadn't loved him, maybe she would've gotten away from him, early on, when she realized what he was capable of doing. Born into an abusive family, there wasn't an out. There was only reliance. Need. Married into it? There must have been a moment where, if the love wasn't there to make you tough it out, you could have escaped with little more than the knowledge that you'd chosen poorly out of the pool of people that life had paraded in front of you.

No matter the cruelty of someone, though, love was still love. And Daryl knew that it was perfectly possible to love those that didn't love you.

He couldn't help but wonder, though, that if the tears were for the man—if they were for the love she'd had for him and the love that he'd used against her—how much more could Carol love if the love was given in return?

As soon as the first blow of the pickaxe hit home, the job was done. The man was put down. He wouldn't rise. Daryl had almost doubted that his body, with barely so much as a scrap of muscle left on it, could do too much to terrorize them if he had ever woken to be one of the monsters. There simply wasn't enough there to drive the weight of his skeleton that was still mostly intact. He was positive, though, that the first blow through the brain was enough to stop even the mild threat that the corpse could be.

 _But Carol didn't stop._

If anything, she built up steam. She picked up speed. The small frame that had quaked under the weight of the pickaxe before the initial blow didn't seem as weak when she lifted it again—and again—and again. She was seized, then, by something. Though she naturally should've exhausted herself with the efforts, she found strength and she found stamina and she continued to drive home the end of the tool. She obliterated the man's skull as surely as the Walkers had destroyed his body.

And when she cried this time? Daryl knew that her tears weren't for him. They weren't for her husband. At least, they weren't for his loss. She was angry. It showed in every fiber of her being. It showed in her stance. In the way her hands held the handle. He heard it in the sounds that she released with her efforts.

 _She was furious._

Each slam down of the pickaxe was a small release of some of her fury. Each blow was some kind of post-mortem vengeance for everything he'd given her when he was alive. Daryl stepped away from her, without even really planning to move away, because her hurt and anger was palpable and he feared that she might turn the pickaxe on someone else looking for even more release.

But she didn't.

She exhausted herself. The final blow of the pickaxe fell and she stopped—sobbing quietly to herself for love or anger or a mix of the two—before she finally freed the tool from the almost non-existent mess of bone bits and brain matter.

Then she handed the pickaxe back to Daryl, her hand brushing his in the process, and she wiped at her soggy face with the back of her free hand.

For a second, Daryl tried to figure out something he might say to her. He tried to decide if he should offer condolences for her earliest tears of sorrow that her anger didn't feel or if he should offer some words of comfort for the anger that was bubbling just beneath her surface. He wondered if he should tell her that he _understood_. That he understood both the pain of losing someone you loved—someone that had never quite learned to love you—and the anger that they had taken quite so long to leave your life.

But in the end, he only reached in his back pocket and found the handkerchief that he usually carried there. He offered it to her, declaring it clean with just a word, and she thanked him softly before she mopped her face with it. She returned it to him in silence and he took it back the same way, stuffing the now damp rag back into his pocket.

But he didn't said anything. He didn't acknowledge that, maybe, he could understand her.

Because saying something, though it might have comforted her, would have meant revealing himself. It would have meant giving out his secrets. It would have put his experiences as out in the open as hers were now that everyone knew how the man lying a few feet away had treated her. And those were things that Daryl, for as long as he could, simply preferred to keep private.

So he didn't say anything. When her hand brushed his, still holding onto the pickaxe and shaking a little with her residual anger and sobs, Daryl simply took it with a nod of his head and enough sound to acknowledge—without any real commitment—that she'd done what she had to do.


End file.
